A Jury Priced This Wi-Fi 6 Portfolio at $37.5 Million. The Switch 2 Is Now the Defendant.

The docket

On 3 November 2026, Atlas Global Technologies LLC filed suit against Nintendo Co., Ltd. in the Marshall Division of the Eastern District of Texas: No. 2:26-cv-00993, assigned to Judge Rodney Gilstrap.

The complaint asserts eleven patents, one per count, every one of them alleged to be essential to IEEE 802.11ax-2021 — Wi-Fi 6. The accused products are not a specific model. They are "all Nintendo products that comply with the 802.11ax-2021 standard, including but not limited to the Switch 2," according to the docket summary published by the patent-litigation tracker Patent Litigator on 5 November.

That summary also reports the willfulness theory: Atlas says it offered Nintendo a licence by letter on 2 October 2025, that Nintendo acknowledged the letter on 2 December 2025, and that Nintendo did not take a licence. Enhanced damages under 35 U.S.C. § 284 are requested, along with a running royalty on future products.

Two reporting limits apply to everything in this section. First, the filing is currently recorded in one specialist tracker; LostInConsoles could not obtain the complaint itself, because the Eastern District of Texas docket sits behind PACER's paywall and the free docket mirrors we tried (CourtListener, Justia, Trellis, Docket Alarm, UniCourt) returned authentication walls or blocks on 14 November. The docket number is given above so the filing can be checked directly. Second, a complaint is a pleading. Nothing in it has been tested, and Nintendo had not filed a response as of this writing.

What the portfolio actually is

The patents did not start life as litigation assets. Google Patents records US 9,531,520 — "Apparatus and Method for Downlink and Uplink Multi-User Transmissions" — with an original assignee of Newracom Inc. and a current assignee of Atlas Global Technologies LLC. The named inventors are Young Hoon Kwon and Ahmad Reza Hedayat, engineers who worked on the 802.11ax standard itself.

Newracom was a Wi-Fi chip company. Its patent estate became a licensing programme. The Indian IP consultancy PurpleVine, which tracks the Wi-Fi 6 licensing market, describes Atlas as "a subsidiary of the well-known NPE company, i.e., Acacia," managing Wi-Fi 6 patents "acquired from a semiconductor company named Newracom," with a portfolio of more than 355 patents worldwide, over 210 granted in the United States and 149 designated Wi-Fi 6 standard-essential patents.

The complaint's own numbers are larger: it alleges an assignment dated 19 February 2021 from the original owner, and says that company's contributions produced over 231 United States patents assigned to Atlas, 175 of which it says are essential to the standard. The gap between 149 and 175 is the ordinary gap between a licensor's claim and a third party's count — and it is the reason a case like this exists.

The only price a jury has put on it

This is not a speculative demand letter. The same portfolio has been to trial.

In No. 2:21-cv-00430, an Eastern District of Texas jury answered on 14 September 2023 that the defendants infringed the asserted claims, and awarded $37,481,264 as a lump sum. The defendants were TP-Link entities. PurpleVine records the same figure independently: a verdict against TP-Link on five of Atlas's patents, "$37,481,264."

According to the Patent Litigator campaign summary, the damages question put to that jury asked for a fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory — FRAND — royalty, and the $37,481,264 was the answer to it. If that characterisation is right, it matters more than the headline number: it means a jury has already been asked what a FRAND rate for this portfolio looks like and returned a figure in the tens of millions.

The Federal Circuit affirmed on 9 June 2026 in a Rule 36 summary affirmance (Nos. 2025-1039, 2025-1076). TP-Link's appeal failed; Bloomberg Law reported on 17 July 2026 that the parties agreed to end the dispute and that a joint stipulation of dismissal was granted. The law firm that ran the case for Atlas, Heim, Payne & Chorush, publicised the affirmance on 11 June 2026 as a "$37.5M patent infringement verdict."

That is the benchmark. Four of the eleven patents now asserted against Nintendo — the '187, '259, '738 and '513 patents — are patents that were tried in that case.

Why a console is a different target than a router

Atlas has been running this campaign since 9 August 2021. The complaint lists fourteen earlier suits. PurpleVine names the targets: HP, Dell, OnePlus, TP-Link, Samsung, D-Link. Patent Litigator adds two open suits against Walmart Inc. in Marshall, Nos. 2:26-cv-00317 and 2:26-cv-00928.

Routers, laptops and retail listings have something in common: the Wi-Fi radio is one component among many, sold at many price points, by companies that already carry patent-licensing departments and often already pay into pools. Sisvel runs a Wi-Fi 6 pool; PurpleVine notes that no pool-initiated litigation has been reported.

A console is a different shape of defendant. One radio design, one bill of materials, enormous unit volume, a single vendor, and a product line that ships for the life of the platform without the radio changing. If the patents read on the standard and the product practises the standard, the damages base is the install base, not a year of router sales.

There is also an institutional difference, and this is where our own data comes in.

The register nobody reads

The Wi-Fi Alliance has maintained a public product register since the 802.11b era. It is downloadable in full, and on 14 November it held 81,346 certified products.

We pulled the whole gaming slice of it, plus the category counts that sit around it.

The console category's 97 entries run from the PlayStation 3 in 2006 to the PlayStation 5 Pro on 4 September 2024, and the filing is messy. Thirty-two are Sony's. Thirteen are NVIDIA SHIELD entries. Ten are VTech children's tablets. Twenty-seven are Linksys, NETGEAR, Belkin and Edimax range extenders filed under "Gaming Console/Peripherals," seven are Harman AV receivers, four are Microsoft networking adapters, three are Logitech powerline kits.

The newest entry in the console category is the PS5 Pro, certified 4 September 2024 with Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7 marked Yes and the 6 GHz band marked Yes. The newest entry in the portable category is the Logitech G Cloud, certified 30 September 2022. The newest entry in the XR category is the Meta Quest 3S, 22 August 2024.

Against that:

• Nintendo has six entries in the entire 81,346-product register. The newest is the Nintendo 2DS, certified 2 September 2013. There is no Switch, no Switch Lite, no Switch OLED and no Switch 2.
• Microsoft has exactly one Xbox-branded entry: "Xbox 360 Wireless Networking Adapter," certified 25 August 2005, before the console launched. It has never certified an Xbox console. It has, however, certified eight Surface products, the most recent being a "Surface Laptop Ultra," certified 13 October 2026 — three weeks before the Nintendo complaint.
• Searches for "Steam Deck," "ROG Ally" and "Legion Go" return nothing. Valve, ASUS and Lenovo have never put a handheld PC in the register.
• Sony's PlayStation line, by contrast, is certified continuously: PS3 (2006), PSP, Vita, PS4 (2013), PS4 Pro (2016), PS5 (2020), PS5 (2022), PS5 Pro (2024).

This has to be stated precisely, because it is easy to overstate. The Wi-Fi Alliance's programme is voluntary in law and near-universal in practice — 19,862 smartphones is what near-universal looks like. Certification is not a legal precondition for selling a Wi-Fi device, and the Alliance's own brand page states that selected brands are offered licence-free "to describe products, technology, network deployments, and operating system support," while the CERTIFIED marks are reserved to members. So an uncertified device calling itself "Wi-Fi 6" is not, on the Alliance's published terms, misusing a mark.

Nor does the register create or defeat patent liability. What it measures is something narrower and more useful: how far a company sits outside the industry's own compliance machinery. Nintendo's radios have not been independently tested against the standard they implement since 2013. Sony's current console carries a certificate that says, in the register, "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7: Yes" — and Sony's own PS5 Pro page carries the line "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7™ is a trademark of Wi-Fi Alliance®." Valve's Steam Deck page advertises a "Tri-band Wi-Fi 6E radio," and Valve has no certificate at all. Nintendo's own support documentation confirms that the Switch 2 supports WPA3 — implemented, in Nintendo's case, without a certificate on file.

What Nintendo will argue

Three defences are obvious, and none of them is frivolous.

FRAND. The complaint itself alleges that the original owner filed a Letter of Assurance with the IEEE on 11 March 2015, stating that it "may own, control, or have the ability to license Patent Claims that might be or become Essential Patent Claims." If the patents are essential and were declared so, the owner's successor is bound by a RAND commitment, and the remedy question becomes a rate-setting question rather than an injunction question. Atlas's own damages theory in the TP-Link case appears to have embraced that framing: the jury was asked for a FRAND royalty.

Exhaustion. The 802.11ax radio inside a console is a purchased component, not Nintendo's own design. If the chip or module supplier holds a licence from Atlas — and Newracom's silicon is inside a great many Wi-Fi 6 devices — then under Quanta v. LG the patentee's rights in that component may be exhausted. The complaint's structure, which accuses the finished product rather than the component, is built to avoid exactly this argument. Whether it works depends on the licence Atlas inherited from Newracom, which is not public.

Validity. Eleven patents, one claim each in most counts, all dating from 2016–2021, all in front of a judge who has handled this portfolio before. Inter partes review is the standard response, and the Federal Circuit's Rule 36 affirmance in the TP-Link appeal decided nothing about validity — a Rule 36 affirmance has no precedential value and no opinion attached. That cuts both ways: it gives Atlas a headline number without giving anyone a ruling to attack.

What this does not prove

It does not prove that the Switch 2 infringes. It does not prove that the patents are valid or essential; "essential to 802.11ax" is Atlas's characterisation, repeated in every complaint it files. It does not prove that Nintendo will pay anything like $37.5 million — that verdict was against router makers, on five patents, for a different product and a different sales base, and a console damages case would be argued on its own records.

It also does not prove that the certification gap matters legally. It does not. It matters as a description of how this company has, since 2013, built radios without the industry's test house — and of what a patent campaign looks for in a defendant.

What to watch

Nintendo's response is due in early December. After that, three markers will tell you whether this is a rate negotiation or a fight: whether Nintendo moves to transfer out of Marshall, whether it petitions the Patent Trial and Appeal Board against any of the eleven, and whether Atlas amends to add the Switch 2's chip or module supplier as a defendant — which is what a plaintiff does when it expects an exhaustion defence.

The number to keep in view is not the $37.5 million. It is 175 — the count of United States patents Atlas says are essential to Wi-Fi 6, against 149 designated as such by the licensing market's own tracker. Eleven of them are now pointed at the first Nintendo console to ship Wi-Fi 6, in a standard where a jury has already named a price and no court has yet ruled on whether the patents are valid.

Sources

• Patent Litigator, Atlas Global Sues Nintendo in Marshall on Eleven Wi-Fi 6 Patents Over the Switch 2, 5 November 2026 — the sole accessible record of No. 2:26-cv-00993 found by this desk.
• Patent Litigator, Atlas Global Technologies' Wi-Fi 6 Patent Campaign — the fourteen prior suits, the 2:21-cv-00430 verdict form, the 2015 IEEE letter of assurance, the W.D. Tex. and E.D. Tex. docket statuses.
• PurpleVine IP, Wi-Fi 6 Patents: Status and Outlook — independent confirmation of the $37,481,264 TP-Link verdict, the Newracom origin, the Acacia parentage and the 355-patent portfolio.
• Heim, Payne & Chorush, HPC Helps Atlas Global Secure $37.5M Patent Infringement Verdict — the plaintiff's counsel on the Federal Circuit affirmance.
• Bloomberg Law, TP-Link, Atlas Global Resolve Patent Clash After Failed Appeal, 17 July 2026.
• Google Patents, US 9,531,520 B2 — original assignee Newracom Inc., current assignee Atlas Global Technologies LLC.
• Wi-Fi Alliance product register, full certified-product export and the category browser — 81,346 products; all counts and certification dates in this article were taken from the register on 14 November 2026.
• Wi-Fi Alliance, Our Brands — generation names are licence-free for descriptive use; CERTIFIED marks are reserved to members.
• Sony, PS5 Pro — "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7™ is a trademark of Wi-Fi Alliance®."
• Valve, Steam Deck technical specifications — "Tri-band Wi-Fi 6E radio."
• Nintendo Support, The Nintendo Switch 2 console cannot find your wireless network — WPA3 support.